


Intersecting Lines

by smartalli



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Prostitution, Season 1, other characters are mentioned but don't appear, please read the end notes if you're concerned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:19:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smartalli/pseuds/smartalli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the first time Harvey’s letting him into the room, his first time at the big kid table, and Mike couldn’t be more excited.</p>
<p>That is, until he catches a face looking back at him through the glass that he’d hoped to never see again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intersecting Lines

“There’s no need to bend over for me.”

Mike jerks with a start, banging his head on the underside of his desk. He surfaces, exasperated, rubbing the back of his head. Harvey’s grin could outshine the damn sun.

“You know you’re not actually supposed to say that to your subordinate. I’m pretty sure they have seminars on that and everything.”

“Well it’s a good thing no one’s around, isn’t it?”

Mike looks around and yeah, the bullpen’s completely empty. When did that happen?

“Did you finish going through the FKP Corp paperwork?”

Mike shakes his head, clearing it, then stutters and recovers. “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

He hands it over.

Harvey takes the paperwork, flips through Mike’s notes for him quickly. “Anything I need to know?”

“No. It’s all pretty straightforward. If there’s anything they tried to hide, I didn’t find it.” Harvey pauses in his flipping, looks up at Mike and lifts an eyebrow. Mike rolls his eyes. “I didn’t miss anything.”

Harvey gives him one more last, pointed look before nodding and walking away.

Mike is just sitting down in his chair when Harvey asks, “You coming?”

Is he coming? To the meeting?

“You never let me come to the meeting.”

“I changed my mind. You want me to change it again?”

Mike scrambles up out of his chair and starts toward Harvey before turning back to grab his suit coat off the back of his chair at Harvey’s pointed, vaguely put-upon look.

“You don’t speak, you listen. If you speak, I’m never letting you back in the room. Got it?”

“Don’t speak, listen. Got it.”

They stop in the hallway and Harvey gives him one more heavy, considering look, as if the choice he’s just settled on is about to be the stupidest one he’s ever made. Then he starts walking again and Mike follows, coming to a stop at the door to the conference room. Mike is steeling himself for his first meeting, squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin when he looks in the room and catches the eye of one of the clients. Mike freezes up.

Oh, god. He can’t go in there.

Suddenly he feels sick and too sharp all over, as if one small touch will make him shatter into a thousand small, unrecoverable pieces.

“Harvey, I can’t go into that room with you. I’m sorry.”

Mike retreats back to his cubicle and avoids looking at Harvey as he goes. When he gets back to his desk Jimmy gives him an odd, vaguely curious look and he can’t stand that either so he retreats to the bathroom, closes himself in a stall, and tries to figure out when it was he forgot to keep breathing.

Eventually he makes his way back to his desk and sits down, and no one pays him any attention. He slips the first file off the top of his stack, flips it open, and starts reading. It helps to lose himself in his work. Still, he feels the dread gnawing at his stomach. It won’t allow him to forget how quickly he ran away, how little explanation he gave Harvey, exactly what he knows he’s going to have own up to.

There’s no way to escape any of this, he knows that now. He thinks he always knew it.

He just thought he’d have more time.

* * *

Mike looks up when a finger comes into view and taps on the top of his cubicle wall. Harvey beckons Mike up with a quirk of the fingers and Mike abandons his work and stands, following Harvey silently down the hallway past Donna’s empty desk and into Harvey’s office. Harvey shuts the door slowly behind them, walks over to his desk and turns around.

“Are you going to explain that to me, or do I need to ask?”

Mike’s stomach is rolling. “I don’t really want to get into it.”

“I don’t really care. Let me rephrase: what the _hell_ was that? You’ve been begging me for a shot at the table. I finally give you one, and now you don’t want it?”

“Harvey, can we just drop it?”

Even as he asks he knows Harvey won’t accept it, that Harvey won’t go along with Mike’s silence, or his own ignorance. Harvey never allows anyone else to control his piece on the chessboard.

“No. We don’t keep secrets from each other. What the hell made you turn around and run in the opposite direction?”

Mike sighs, resigned, chin dropping down to his chest. There’s no way to get out of this, and he aches for a time when he could’ve made another choice, been a different person. But even as he thinks that, he knows he could never had said no to Harvey that day at the Chilton. What he’d been offering had been too valuable, too precious.

“I’ve done some things I’ve regretted.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that. I’m not going to forget the briefcase full of pot that fell at my feet anytime soon.”

Mike is quiet. “This is worse.”

“Illegal?”

Mike nods slowly, eyes focused on the ground in front of his feet.

“Don’t tell me you killed someone?”

It’s meant as a joke, clearly, but Mike’s bare _no_ with a tiny shake of the head must trigger something in Harvey because his next question is much softer, much closer.

“Mike?”

Mike’s head drags up. It feels heavy, and it’s difficult to keep it up, to look in Harvey’s general direction, if not at Harvey himself. He can’t bear to do that, to see his face. He’s not sure if it’s _Harvey_ he’s scared to tell, or if he would be scared to tell anyone at all. The pain of the experience was bad enough that he was hoping it was one of those things the world would give you a pass on later.

_You’ve done your time, kid. It’s okay to let it go, to start forgetting._

He should’ve remembered that life doesn’t work like that.

“I had a hard time paying the rent and taking care of Grammy and…I got desperate. And when you’re desperate you can do desperate things.”

“Like sell pot?”

Mike is tired. So, so tired. “Technically, I think I was a drug trafficker that day, but no…worse.”

Harvey is silent next to him, and Mike stares at that weird picture Harvey has on the wall, the one with the toy duck and the doll. It doesn’t seem like the kind of art Harvey would own, it seems like the kind of art Public Harvey would own, and he realizes the two of them are clashing together, in this office, over Mike. Public Harvey would fire him on the spot or drag him over the coals for failing to live up to being Harvey’s reflection. Private Harvey is standing quietly, waiting for Mike to explain. They’re both dying to know, but one of them is too much of a gentleman to ask, and the other is dreading Mike’s response, knowing it’ll tell him just how much of a mistake he made when he offered Mike the job.

“My power was shut off because I couldn’t afford to pay the bill, I was behind on my rent because I had to pay Grammy’s, I barely ate anything because there definitely wasn’t any money left over for food…a teacher’s pension just doesn’t go all that far in New York, so I had to make up the difference on her bills before mine. I was nineteen and I’d been kicked out of school, and the money I’d earned from being a bike messenger and taking tests just wasn’t enough to cover the spread, so…”

Mike can feel Harvey next to him, immovable and solid, until he breaks the wall between them, says Mike’s name so softly he aches inside.

Mike’s voice cracks. He feels like he’s barely holding himself together. “I was a hooker, Harvey. I sold my body to make rent. And not once. Not twice. I did it for almost six years, and I _hated_ every single moment of it.”

Mike finally looks at Harvey and he doesn’t know what he should have expected, because he never allowed himself to play this scenario out in his head. He never thought he’d have to tell anyone this, much less the person to whom he owes more than anyone. But he’s sure that there was one thing he didn’t expect at all: for Harvey to look completely blank.

“The man in the conference room…he was one of my customers. A regular. Once, sometimes twice a week, every week, for five and a half years. Until I stopped returning his calls, anyway.”

“Tom Fallon.”

“Is that his name? He never told me. He told me to call him Scott the first time he hired me.” Mike closes his eyes, swallows. “Among other things.”

“Why did you stop returning his calls?”

Mike looks up, a sad sort of resignation beginning to take hold in his chest. He smiles, sadly, briefly. “Mostly? Because you offered me a job.”

Harvey backs away from him then, circles around to his desk. Mike expected it, but he feels the pain of it anyway, the sting of rejection, the beginning of another life lost, just when it was getting started.

“So that’s why I couldn’t go into the room.”

Harvey nods. He’s quiet, and Mike savored that earlier, but he hates it now. He wants Harvey to throw out some sort of snarky comeback, one of his ridiculous rules, anything. But he’s stubbornly quiet, and Mike hates it. He hates that he’s done this. He’s broken this, them. And there’s nothing he can do to get it back.

“I need notes on the Juster Foods contract by the end of the day.”

Mike is confused and taken aback and it must show, because Harvey quickly says, “Get back to work,” before Mike can utter any sort of question or protest.

Still, his voice is much gentler than normal, and he maintains eye contact just a little bit longer than he normally would, as if he’s looking right into Mike, and asking Mike to trust him.

It doesn’t seem like it should be enough to settle Mike, but somehow it is. Somehow, Harvey makes it enough.

* * *

Mike is the only one left in the bullpen when Harvey comes in to retrieve him. It’s not even that late, but the firm has closed up a lot of cases recently, and his fellow associates are taking advantage of the brief downtick in work to beg off before dinner for once.

“Hey. So I’m almost finished going through this contract.” He quickly pulls over his notes and says, “There’s a couple of odd clauses. One of-”

“Mike, close the contract.”

Mike looks up. “But I’m almost done. I f-”

“We’re done with work for the day. Get your stuff, let’s go.”

Harvey’s voice is too firm not to obey, and he closes the file, turns off his desk lamp, and grabs his bag. Harvey walks them to the elevator bank, walks them across the lobby, walks them to the town car with Ray waiting at the back door. Neither of them has said anything the whole way, and Mike still has no idea what to say now. The silence is awkward and heavy and normally Mike would say something to break the silence, but Harvey isn’t giving him a lot to go on and it’s been a long day and Mike is tired and he has no patience for trying to ferret out intentions. He settles on a hesitant nod and starts to walk down the street toward the subway when he’s stopped by a hand, grasping the sleeve of his coat. Harvey tugs him over gently and pushes him into the car before getting in himself, and Mike is so taken aback, he can’t form the words to make a protest.

Harvey crosses his legs, shifting his body away from Mike just enough that Mike knows he’s closing himself off. Ray doesn’t so much as make a peep from the front either, and in the closed environment of the town car Mike finds his thoughts racing, unable to shut them off in the quiet. So he opens the car window a crack and lets the sounds of the city filter in.

When they get to Harvey’s building Harvey pulls him from the car, fingers on his sleeve, and Mike makes no effort to resist. He nods at Ray and follows Harvey, and tries to pretend like this is normal, this is every day. But this is his first time in Harvey’s building and he feels young and out of place and uncomfortable for more than his own sake, as if he’s forced Harvey to reveal something about himself before he’s ready.

Harvey shuts the door to his condo closed behind them and Mike stops and stands in the middle of the room, looking around, clutching the strap of his bag, afraid to go any further.

“Your place is nice,” he says, for want of anything else to say. It’s the polite thing, the proper thing, the obvious thing, but Mike still cringes as he says it. He feels like he’s just violated some sort of understanding between them, though he’s not exactly sure what that is.

He looks up to find Harvey watching him from the kitchen, mouth set in a firm line.

“I’m sorry.” He chokes on his words, shakes his head and licks his dry lips. He’s messed it up, he’s messed it all up for the both of them and he can’t take that back now. “I never wanted to screw you over.”  
“What are you talking about?”

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. No one else would’ve ever given me that chance.”

Harvey sucks in a deep breath. “You think I brought you here to fire you?”

“You don’t have to. Look, I’ll just leave. You don’t ever have to see me again.”

“I’m not firing you. And I’m not letting you quit either, so get that thought out of your damn head right now.”

Mike clutches the strap of his bag tighter. Harvey’s eyebrows draw together and for a moment he looks absolutely devastated.

“You think I’m _mad_ at you?”

“I lied to you.”

“You didn’t tell me something painful that’s none of my damn business. That’s not the same.”

Mike shakes his head. “No. I affected your ability to do your job.”

“Did you know Fallon owned FKP Corp?” Mike shakes his head. “Then how could you know he was going to be standing in that conference room today? Only an asshole would be mad at you for that.”

Mike makes eye contact again and Harvey is staring at him so desperately, so intently, and Mike doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say, or if he’s supposed to say anything at all, and he finds the more time he stands here and says nothing, the more half-formed words build up and die in his throat.

Harvey walks over and Mike takes the glass of water he’s offering, clutches it in his hands as though it will keep him from flying away.

Harvey’s words are soft, slow, careful. He’s never been _careful_ with Mike before, he’s never had to be _careful_ , and it makes him want to scream. “I _hate_ that you felt it was the only option you had left. I _hate_ that you were forced into doing something you hated, something you would have never chosen to do otherwise. I don’t hate _you_.”

Mike studies his fingers, wonders if he clenches his hands any harder if he’ll break the glass.

“You did what you had to do to take care of the woman who raised you, even if you hated yourself every day for it. No one _ever_ gets to make you feel like less because of that.”

Mike looks up.

“I’m not mad at you, Mike. But you’ll forgive me if I want to rip every single one of them into small, easily misplaced pieces.”

Mike takes a big sip of the glass of water in his hands, tries to control his shaking as he lowers them. “They were paying me, Harvey.”

“So that gave them a license to treat you like garbage?”

“How do you know how they treated me?”

“Do you really need to ask me that question?”

No, he doesn’t. From the day they met, Mike has been an open book to Harvey. So obvious, so eager. Mike never was much good at hiding himself from the people who matter. It’s only Grammy’s declining health that gave him a leg up in that relationship.

Harvey’s voice is almost a whisper when he asks, “Why did you really stop seeing Tom Fallon?”

Mike feels old and sad and resigned because he knows if he was back there, back at nineteen, back where this all started, that he’d have to make the same decision all over again. And he knows what he’d choose. He knows what he’d _have_ to choose. He never had a chance.

“You don’t want to hear this, Harvey.”

Mike swallows at Harvey’s calm, patient gaze. He thinks he can handle this, but he’s wrong.

“Just about four and a half months ago I met him in a bar at his request and he drugged my drink. He didn’t want me to fight back when he dragged me into the alleyway behind the bar. He didn’t have the cash on hand to pay me, but he didn’t really think that mattered because he still wanted what he wanted and, in his words, “Baby, you’re a whore. It’s what you’re here for.” He liked it when I didn’t resist.”

“He can’t get away with that.”

Harvey is fuming, livid on his behalf, and that’s almost enough to make Mike smile. He’s afraid it comes out as more of a grimace.

“He can, and he will. There’s nothing I can do about it, especially not now.”

“We can make him pay.”

“So you’d put a case up against a prominent businessman, a pillar of the community, to argue that he raped a male prostitute who is now practicing law without a degree? Because there’s no way those two things wouldn’t be front and center. Your livelihood, your good name, the firm – they’d all be in jeopardy. Maybe it’s a fight you want to have, but it’s not a fight we’d win.”

Harvey looks defeated and Mike hates this, he hates that. He hates that this is one of those times he’s so right, Harvey can’t come up with a counter argument.

“I’ll tell you everything I know about every client I had, so you won’t be surprised like this in the future. But I’m pretty sure I was given a lot of fake names, so we may need to find a sketch artist.”

The silence goes on a bit too long and Harvey gets a look on his face as if something awful has just occurred to him, something he’s never considered before. “You remember all their faces.”

“Yeah.” Mike nods, swallows. “But that’s not the difficult part.”

Harvey looks pained suddenly, and he walks over to his bar and pours himself a large serving of Scotch, grimacing as he downs it in one go. “Almost six years,” he says softly. “Almost six years of thinking you had to be raped to get by.”

Mike doesn’t think about this much, or he tries not to. He tries to classify it as something he _used to do_ , as someone he _used to be_ , as if he could ever be so lucky as to leave something this big behind. But Mike knows better than anyone: bad choices don’t just fade away, no matter how hard you wish.

“Are you sure you really want to know? Because there’s no reason you need to. I can just give you their faces. I don’t need to tell you anything else. It doesn’t need to be a huge part of your thoughts like it is mine. I don’t want to do that to you.”

It’s bad enough that Mike can never let them go. Harvey doesn’t need that too.

“If you don’t want to tell me or you can’t…you don’t have to.” Mike nods, hands jerking as he takes a gulp of water. “I _refuse_ to take something from you that you aren’t willing to give.”

Mike lets out a long, shuddering breath and almost sinks to his knees in gratitude. His muscles ache and his head hurts from the tension he’s been carrying all day and before he knows it he’s dragging himself over to Harvey’s sofa and collapsing onto it. He’s done trying to hold himself up today. He leans forward, braces his arms on his thighs and lets his chin drop forward to meet his chest

Harvey walks over quietly and sits down next to him, close enough to touch. Mike doesn’t know why he does it, would never have dared before now, but he reaches out a hand and grasps the fabric of Harvey’s pants tight, clenches it in his fist.

“Thank you for trusting me.”

Mike lets out a breath that sounds a little like a sob.

“And if there ever comes a day when you want to talk about it, I’ll hear everything you have to say. You don’t have to carry this alone anymore.”

Mike had _hated_ it, all of it, every single second. But crying about it, complaining about it, dwelling on it had felt like intense pressure on a fresh bruise. When he was in the middle of selling away the last of his dignity he couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t have thought about it, and still gone through with it. He couldn’t let it be important. He couldn’t let how he felt matter. He closed himself up.

He didn’t know he still knew how to cry.

* * *

Mike isn’t surprised when he gets called into Jessica’s office. It’s not that he saw this coming, but he knows what he’s done, how he lied, and he knew he couldn’t keep his past quiet forever. Jessica is too smart, too good, to let a fraud work under her for long. He just wishes he’d been given a little more time – a little more time with Harvey, a little more time to prove what he’s capable of.

Jessica’s assistant nods him through and he finds Jessica facing the windows, teacup in hand. Mike glances at the clock on the wall. 6:18 AM. He’d thought he’d be the only one here, but she’d probably been counting on that. It wasn’t exactly a state secret how much time Mike spent at the office, when he arrived for the day, when he left.

“Shut the door.”

Mike was already in the process and he pulls it shut the last few inches, walks further into her office.

“I’m firing you.”

Mike nods, but it’s to himself – Jessica is still facing the windows, and it’s not like she needs his acceptance or affirmation anyway.

It’s a sting, but it isn’t a shock. A small part of him was still unrealistically hopeful that she would be merciful, or that he would somehow escape her attention. He should have realized that nothing escapes her attention for long.

“How long did you think it would take before I found out?”

Mike shrugs, sticks his hands in his pockets. “I never thought about it.”

And he didn’t, not really. Harvey had told him not to worry, and he hadn’t. He’d trusted that, even though he knew Harvey couldn’t control all of Harvard Law School and everyone that went there, no matter how much he might want to. But that doesn’t matter. This is not about Harvey. It was Mike’s choice to take the job, and Mike’s choice to lie. He just hopes that’s all she knows.

“You know what pisses me off?” She spins, levels him with a glare so icy, he feels himself freeze over into a solid mass in the middle of her office. “You’re good. You’re really, really good. And beyond that, you work your ass off. Harvey isn’t the easiest person to work with, and he has incredibly high standards. And yet, somehow, you surprise him the way no one else can. You make him a better lawyer, and he was already pretty damn good before you got here. But you thought the rules didn’t apply to you, and now _my firm_ could be in a hell of a lot of trouble because of you.”

“Write something up, a gag order or…whatever. Whatever you want, I’ll sign it.”

“You bet your ass, you’ll sign it.” She circles around to behind her desk, sets her teacup down. “No law school. How did you even manage to keep up?”

“I’m smart, and I work hard.”

“And working with Harvey was so amazing, you wanted to do anything you could to keep working with him.”

She raises an eyebrow and Mike blushes. She’s hitting a little too close to home for his comfort.

“You must have done a spectacular job convincing him you could handle the work.”

“Harvey didn’t know.”

“ _Excuse me?_ ” She sounds so incredulous, Mike winces. “You expect me to believe _Harvey_ didn’t know you were lying?”

“He didn’t.”

She doesn’t believe him, he can tell, and Mike can’t let it go any further than this. He can’t destroy Harvey or his good name. Not for Mike.

“When I was nine my parents were killed by a drunk driver.” He says it with a sigh, like the air is being let out of him, and sits down in the chair in front of her desk, slouching back against the seat back. He doesn’t work for her anymore, not really, and he’s given up all pretense of impressing her, but hopefully she’ll listen, and she’ll hear Mike’s truth. “The lawyer botched the case, and the guy who killed them got off with nothing. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. No kid deserves someone screwing up their life like that.

“I got into Columbia on a full scholarship, and I was doing great, and then I found out my grandmother wasn’t doing so great. She couldn’t keep up on her bills, she couldn’t keep the power on. So I started writing papers for people and taking tests for people in big survey courses, and doing whatever I could to earn the money to help her out. She raised me after my parents died. It was the least I could do for her. I kept it up for about four months before I got caught.”

“How _did_ you get caught?”

“My friend convinced me to add selling tests to my repertoire, and I sold one to the dean’s daughter.”

“He expelled you.”

He nods. “He expelled me. My dreams of being a lawyer were…gone. Grammy needed help, so I got a job as a bike messenger. That almost paid all the bills, hers and mine, but I was able to make the difference with a few other assorted jobs.”

It’s all the truth, or as much as Mike can give her. It’s all the truth of Mike’s she gets to have.

Mike looks down at his hands briefly – at the torn cuticle on his left ring finger, at the ink stain on the heel of his hand – before looking back up.

“I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t plan to screw your firm over or to prey on Harvey’s…generosity. I just happened upon the interview, and I took my shot. I impressed him with my legal knowledge and I practically dared him to give me a shot. I wanted it so badly I think I believed my own lie for a moment. And I think he couldn’t help but believe me too.”

She stares at him for a long, long time before finally nodding, once. He’s so relieved he almost lets it show but he holds it in to be released when he’s finally out of the office.

He believed his lie so much, she believed it too.

She slips a paper in front of him and he leans forward and signs without reading it. She lifts an eyebrow at that, but he doesn’t need to read it. He can imagine what it says, and anyway, Mike won’t ever be mentioning to anyone that he worked here, or that he pulled one over on the entire judicial system by pretending to be someone he’s not. He’s not going to admit to being a fraud.

She picks up the paper, slips it into a folder on her desk. “Did you know Tom Fallon is one of my oldest friends? He had some interesting things to say to me yesterday.”

“Did he.”

There’s no question in his response and Mike tries to stay calm, tries to keep his body from clenching, tries to remember that it would be personal suicide for Tom to mention anything true to Jessica. He fails, judging by the sudden quirk of her lip.

“Did you know he was married?”

Mike clenches his jaw to keep from screaming. “No, he never told me that.”

“I could tell you the whole story, but I suppose you already know it. That you were a dalliance five years ago, that he isn’t proud he cheated on his wife. He says you were a difficult man to shake.”

“Does he.”

“And that because of that, being around you just wouldn’t be comfortable for him. That he’d have to take his business elsewhere. Just how long did you continue to pursue him after he told you he was no longer interested?”

“Is that what he said?”

It’s too difficult now to keep the anger from bleeding into his voice. It surprises her, and for a moment, she lets it slip onto her face.

Mike stands. He doesn’t want to be here any longer. “Not that it makes a difference, but I decided to stop seeing him four and a half months ago when he roofied my drink and tried to rape me in an alleyway outside a bar.”

Mike walks toward the doorway and stops, his hand on the doorknob. Something has just occurred to him, even through his anger, and he can’t believe he didn’t realize it until now, until this very moment.

He turns to find Jessica looking at him. “You knew all along I was lying. You knew the very first day I walked into the office. You wanted to see what I would do.”

For a moment, she looks almost proud of him. “I wondered if I might have another Harvey on my hands.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I had a Mike Ross. It’s a shame I couldn’t keep him, not with men out there like Tom Fallon.”

She just looks at him, and he looks at her, and for a moment he wonders if maybe she sees even more than he realizes.

“Did you make him sign something too?”

“I know a half dozen things about Tom Fallon that would end him and his companies for good. A piece of paper is nothing to that. I have his balls in a vise.”

“One of your oldest friends, huh?”

She has a spark in her eye and an almost smile on her lips, and not for the first time, Mike is a little terrified of her. “I never said he was a dear friend, or a close friend, or a trusted friend.”

Mike wonders how many dear friends she has, if there’s anyone she really trusts, if being who she is even allows that. Mike would never want to live that way, and he’s suddenly terribly grateful he’ll never walk back into these offices again.

Mike has no more apologies in him so he simply nods once, opens the door, and steps through to the other side.

* * *

“You didn’t get a better job offer.”

Mike opens his door all the way and lets Harvey in, quietly closing the door behind him.

“Does she think I’m an idiot? I can’t believe she fired you!”

Harvey is so angry, he’s pacing, staring at Mike as if somehow this is the single worst thing he’s ever heard in his life.

“I can. I’m a fraud, Harvey.” He says it gently. He doesn’t know how to say it any other way. “She was protecting the firm, protecting all the other clients, protecting the work we’d already done.”

Harvey deflates, the majority of his fight gone now as he settles into a chair at Mike’s kitchen table. Mike’s right, and Harvey knows it. More importantly, he has to accept it.

“You deserved better than that.”

Mike smiles to himself. “I don’t know, I think I still managed to come out ahead. You gave me a new way to survive, Harvey. And it was amazing. I never thought anyone would give me a chance like that.”

“It wasn’t supposed to end.”

Mike smiles again at that. I knew it couldn’t last. We would have been found out eventually by someone who wouldn’t have hesitated to hold it over our heads or go to the authorities. And then it would have been a lot worse for you, and for the firm. They would’ve questioned every case I worked on, the clients wouldn’t have trusted you any longer…”

Mike pauses, shifts so he’s now sitting at his tiny kitchen table across from a frustrated Harvey.

“I could have fixed this.”

“Nothing’s broken. I just realized that my past and your present aren’t lines that intersect.” Mike leans back in his chair. “I told her you didn’t know anything about it, that you were as in the dark as anyone else.”

“You didn’t need to protect me.”

“Yes I did. You put yourself on the line for me. No one’s ever shown me that kind of faith before.”

“She didn’t believe you. There’s no way she believes I didn’t know.”

“I can be pretty convincing when I need to be.”

He doesn’t say that pretending to enjoy being fucked by a sadistic bastard twice your size can prepare you really well for lying. Harvey doesn’t want to hear those words, and Mike doesn’t want to say them. Instead the words sit, festering in his stomach like an ulcer.

“Anyway, I could tell she knew something was up when she called me into her office. I just filled in some blanks for her. I didn’t actually go to Harvard, and she does know how to make a phone call, Harvey. She’s known I was lying about that since the first day.”

Harvey gives him a soft, slow-lidded blink. “She wanted to see what we were going to do with it.”

He shouldn’t be surprised that Harvey made that leap but he has to admit that a part of him is. “What I was, yeah.”

Harvey is disappointed, frustrated with him. “Mike-”

“I’m not giving her ammunition to use against you.”

Harvey shakes his head, sits back and stares out the window next to him. He has no say, and Mike knows it’s killing him.

“You should take on Harold as your new associate.” At Harvey’s raised eyebrow and disbelieving grimace, Mike says, “I know, he’s skittish. He’s not going to banter with you, and he’ll probably be terrified you’re going to fire him every two seconds, but I’ve read his work and it’s _great_. He definitely suffers from a lack of confidence, but he’s smart, he’s loyal, and he does really good work. That’s what you need. And he needs someone who’ll stand up for him once in a while, especially against Louis.”

“He doesn’t have your mind. It isn’t going to be a partnership.”

Mike’s heart climbs into his throat. “Maybe not. But being mentored by you is going to do a hell of a lot of good for him.”

Harvey nods, looks down at his hands, then shrugs off his suit coat and loosens the knot of his tie. He’s rolling the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows when he asks, “You have any beer?”

He’s settling himself in, into Mike’s apartment, and Mike feels startled and warm and tentatively happy.

He gets up and grabs a beer, popping the top with the side of the counter before turning and handing it to Harvey.

“You know, they make bottle openers now. Remind me to buy you one.”

Mike doesn’t respond, just sits back down at the table, and Harvey asks a concerned, “Mike?”

He has to steel himself to say this. He hadn’t wanted to, but he knew he’d have to. He won’t give Jessica ammunition to hurt Harvey, and as much as saying this will pain the both of them, not saying it will leave Harvey flying a little blind.

“There was another reason Jessica called me into her office.” Mike looks up. “Tom Fallon is one of her oldest friends.”

Harvey looks stricken, his jaw clenching. But his voice is iron when he says, “He wouldn’t have told her that.”

Mike shakes his head. “No, he told her something else, something I couldn’t totally refute without telling the truth. And she doesn’t get to hear that truth.”

“What did he tell her?”

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter what he’d told her, not to Mike. He knows how untrue it all is, can smell the desperation leaking out of Fallon’s attempt at a cover up. But it matters to Harvey, that’s obvious. Almost as if it’s a personal affront.

“Something about how I was a one night stand years ago – a dalliance, is the word he used…how fucking pretentious – and he’s not proud of cheating on his wife, but it was only the one time, even though I had been _persistent_ in my pursuit of him.”

Which was a huge fucking laugh, really.

“And that having me there was too uncomfortable for him. So he couldn’t in good conscience keep his business there if I was there too.”

Harvey’s hand clenches the beer bottle tightly, his knuckles a pasty white.

“It’s a lie, Harvey. That’s all.”

“I’m going to make him pay.”

“No, you’re not.” He sighs. “The next time you see him you’re going to walk into the room, you’re going to shake his hand, and then you’re going to say something snarky. Then you’re going to close _the shit_ out of him, because that’s what you do. This deal doesn’t have anything to do with what he did to me.”

They both know he’s right, even if it feels less like justice than it should, and Harvey grimaces, clenching his teeth in silence before abruptly standing, pulling Mike out of his chair, and wrapping him in a tight hug.

Mike is too startled at first to respond, but he melts quickly into Harvey’s arms, let’s himself be held.

It’s the very least they both deserve.

* * *

Mike goes to see Grammy the next day, to tell her he’s been exposed, that Jessica found out, that he’s no longer a lawyer. They sit quietly together for a few minutes. Mike doesn’t really know what else to say, or even if there’s anything _to_ say, and Grammy doesn’t try to fill the silence. She just clasps his arm, keeps it there through six silent games of chess, letting up only when it’s time for Mike to go. He’s so ashamed of how much of a disappointment he is that _I love you_ gets stuck in his throat when he hugs her goodbye. She holds his face in her hands and looks him in the eye for a long time before she kisses him on the cheek, hugging him tighter than he ever thought possible.

He can never tell her what he’s done, what he really had to do to take care of her. How many dark alleyways he’s been pulled down, how many cheap hotel rooms he’s checked into, how many times a man was just a little too rough, laughed a little too hard. How many times they got off throwing money at him and made him fetch it, like a dog. But if the choice was that or Grammy’s safety and comfort, he knows he’d make the choice all over again, no matter what it did to him.

* * *

The knock on the door startles Mike a little, and he looks up from his book briefly before slipping the postcard he was using as a bookmark back into the pages. He sets the book on the coffee table, stands, walks over to the front door and pulls it open.

Harvey walks in carrying a white plastic bag, already working on loosening his tie as he says, “You were right about Harold.”

Mike shakes off his surprise, says, “You’re probably nicer to him than you were to me, too.”

“Right now a strong _wind_ could knock this kid out of alignment.”

Mike laughs. He’s not wrong. “He’ll get stronger, more confident, the more he works with you.”

Harvey hums a response as he goes looking through Mike’s silverware drawer. “He found something you would have found.” He turns, chopsticks in hand, and holds out a set to Mike. “It took him three times as long, but he found it.”

“I told you.”

Harvey just nods, looks at him. “I almost put him on his ass today.”

Clearly they’re not talking about Harold any longer.

“He smiled at me, all smug, like he thought he knew something I didn’t, like he’d _won_ something, and I nearly lost it.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t hit him.”

In the silence that follows, all Mike can think about is how grateful he is for the man standing in front of him, how grateful he is for the new life he got a glimpse of, how grateful he is to have found someone who, in such a short time, understands him so well.

“You should’ve seen Louis’ face today when I requested Harold.”

Mike barks a laugh and Harvey grins. “Nice side benefit.”

“He’s going to tie himself up in _knots_ trying to figure it out.”

“I’m definitely sorry I’m missing that.”

Harvey pulls off his jacket and lays it across the back of his chair and they fill each other’s plates and sit down to eat and it’s just so _nice._ Not anxious or sad the way it had been with Grammy earlier, though that was all Mike’s fault, not hers. He forgot how easy it could be to be with someone who knows the dark, scared places inside of you and refuses to turn away.

* * *

Harvey comes over every single night. He always brings dinner and never lets Mike pay him back, and the one time Mike suggested it, Harvey gave him a look that spelled out just how much of an idiot he thought Mike was for even suggesting that, so Mike never asked again.

Tonight’s dinner is pizza, and Mike can smell the pepperoni and olives before he even opens the door. They put a game on, and park on the couch with the pizza in front of them on the coffee table. Mike forgot to buy more beer earlier, and Harvey gives him grief about it until Mike shoots over to the corner store and comes back with a six pack of Sam Adams Boston Lager. He presses one into Harvey’s hand and takes one of his own, smiling back when Harvey grins at him.

Most of the day it’s easy to keep going, to move forward from the sting of his most recent, failed life. It’s only these moments with Harvey at the end of the day when he finds himself missing what they used to have, what they can never have again.

“You know, you don’t have to come over all the time. I know you have a life of your own. I promise I can fend for myself.”

Harvey stills next to him, asks carefully, “Do you want me to stop coming over?”

“I love having you here. But I also know exactly how much work you have. I don’t want you to sacrifice the quality of your work for me.”

Harvey just looks at him, gives him the barest hint of a smile. “I’m still the best closer in New York, don’t worry. I just have different priorities now.”

Mike shifts so he’s sitting sideways on the couch, his legs crossed, facing Harvey. He thinks he knows what Harvey is saying but it would hurt so, so badly to be wrong that he can’t seem to take the chance, to trust in him and speak the words both of them have yet to say.

“I didn’t just hire you for your mind.”

Mike can’t even bring himself to joke, and there’s an obvious one, hanging right there between them in the air, just waiting to be snatched up. All he can say is, “No?”

“Something in my gut told me that hiring you was the right decision. I listened.”

“Or the wrong one.”

“ _No,_ it was the right decision. I knew it as soon as I’d made it.”

“Harvey…”

Harvey turns toward Mike. “If I hadn’t made it, we wouldn’t be here now. Maybe we were never meant to work together long term. Maybe it was just the beginning of something much more important.”

Mike swallows, braces his hand on the back of the couch. He’s never seen Harvey this _open,_ this _brave_ , and he finds it makes him want to be brave too.

“These last two weeks…we’ve been going on dates every night.”

He can’t believe he didn’t notice it until now, but that’s exactly what they were. Low pressure dates with a constant stream of light affection and Harvey, trying to prove to Mike that he could provide for Mike. That he cared for him.

“I wanted to give you the chance to kick me out, to tell me no. That this isn’t what you wanted.”

“You’re persistent.”

“I know when something’s important. And if I’d let you walk away that day, I know I would have regretted it. I would have always wondered if I should have taken a chance on hiring you.”

Harvey’s hand is resting on the back of the sofa near Mike’s and Mike slips their hands together, pulls Harvey slowly forward into a kiss. It’s really more a dry brush of lips than a kiss and their hands are a little too awkwardly placed for either of them to be comfortable, but it still feels a little like Mike’s heart is suddenly re-starting in his chest after a long absence.

“Is work really okay?”

Harvey tugs him forward by his t-shirt, kisses him once. “You said it yourself, Harold is good. And I’ve lightened my load a little. I gave a few clients to Louis.”

Mike is shocked. “You gave away clients to _Louis_?

“The shock and suspicion on his face alone made it worth it.”

“But you haven’t had any client dinners, no late night meetings…”

Harvey smiles patiently. “Like I said, my priorities are different now. I can close someone just as easily over lunch as I can over dinner. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be very good at my job.” He smirks. “And we both know how good I am at my job.”

Mike stands, takes his empty beer to the fridge to exchange it for a fresh one, popping the top off with his Harvey-purchased bottle opener. Mike is afraid to ask where he got it. He probably paid $150 for it at _Sur la Table_ or something.

He leans back against the counter, takes a sip. There’s only one big thing left to talk about, only one big thing left that matters. Mike knows Harvey cares about him, but it’s not always easy to take on someone’s past too. And Mike’s past has the very real chance of meeting Harvey’s present every day.

“You’re thinking too much. Stop it.”

Harvey stands, walks over to Mike and sets his beer down at the kitchen table.

“I can’t ignore it, Harvey.”

“There’s nothing to ignore. You were nineteen, and you made a decision with awful, debilitating personal consequences to save the person you loved most. There’s nothing to forgive, nothing to make allowances for. I refuse to hurt you any further than you’ve already been hurt, or to add to your pain in any way. I don’t care who you slept with, Mike. I only care that they hurt you.”

Mike bows his head, feels unasked for tears brimming. He breathes in, deep and slow, until the squeezing on his heart starts to lessen, until he can breathe without his body shaking. A hand comes up and gently squeezes the back of his neck and Mike reaches out a hand to hold onto Harvey’s shirt, to anchor him to this moment. He feels so light, he’s afraid he might fly away.

But he won’t, he can’t. Not with Harvey keeping him grounded.

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in season one, so anything that follows after doesn’t apply. This story has a heavy theme of past rape/non con/dub con and it is mentioned a few times as a part of Mike’s recent past, though I never explicitly go into detail. Please take care with yourself and know that if this is something that is difficult for you to read, this may not be the story for you. Again, very little detail is given.


End file.
